The Maelstrom

Daily Archives: January 1, 2014

A very detailed look at the northern polar vortex on Saturn. Click for larger to really see the nice detail. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

I hope everybody saw the new year come in and enjoyed yourselves. I am working again today so I didn’t make it very long into the night. If all goes well today will be my Friday and it is quite overdue after working for two weeks straight.

The image here is a very nicely detailed look at Saturn’s polar vortex and a fine way to bring in 2014.

The vortex at Saturn’s north pole — seen here in the infrared — takes on the menacing look of something from the imagination of Edgar Allan Poe. But really, of course, it’s just another example of the amazing, mesmerizing meteorology on Saturn.

The eye of the immense cyclone is about 2,000 kilometers (1,250 miles) wide, 20 times larger than most on Earth. For another view of the vortex, see PIA14946.

This view is centered on clouds at 89 degrees north latitude, 109 degrees west longitude. North is up and rotated 33 degrees to the left. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 14, 2013 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 750 nanometers.The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 476,000 miles (766,000 kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 45 degrees. Image scale is 3 miles (5 kilometers) per pixel.